The Manners and Customs of the people of Willenhall have been those held in common with the populace of the surrounding parishes, and which have been dealt with too fully in the published writings of Mr. G. T. Lawley to need more than a brief review here.

The seasonal custom of Well Dressing has been alluded to in Chapter XVII., and of Beating the Bounds in Chapter V. Other ancient customs of minor import existed, but space cannot be found to treat them in a general history.

The social calibre of the people a century or so ago may be gauged by a local illustration of the custom of Wife Selling.

This practice was once common enough everywhere, and amongst the ignorant and illiterate in some parts it is still held to be a perfectly legitimate transaction. From the “Annual Register” this local instance has been clipped:—

“Three men and three women went to the Bell Inn, Edgbaston Street, Birmingham, and made the following singular entry in the toll book which is kept there: August 31, 1773, Samuel Whitehouse, of the Parish of Willenhall, in the county of Stafford, this day sold his wife, Mary Whitehouse, in open market, to Thomas Griffiths, of Birmingham, value one shilling. To take her with all her faults.

(Signed) Samuel Whitehouse.
Mary Whitehouse.

Voucher, Thomas Buckley, of Birmingham.”

The parties were all exceedingly well pleased, and the money paid down for the toll as for a regular purchase.

So much for the moral status of the people; now to consider them from the industrial side.

The older generation of Willenhall men were accustomed, ere factory Acts and kindred forms of parental legislation had regulated working hours and otherwise ameliorated the conditions of labour, to slave for many weary hours in little domiciliary workshops. Boys were then apprenticed at a tender age, and soon became humpbacked in consequence of throwing in the weight of their little bodies in the endeavour to eke out the strength of the feeble thews and bones in their immature arms.

In those days men worked when they liked, and played when it suited them; they generally played the earlier days of the week, even if at the end they worked night and day in the attempt to average the weekly earnings. In this connection it has been suggested that in pre-Reformation times Willenhall folk duly honoured St. Sunday and well as St. Monday, consecrating both days to the sacred cause of weekly idleness. Or was Willenhall’s Holy Well dedicated to St. Dominic, and came by grammatical error to be called St. Sunday? As thus—Sanctus Dominicus abbreviated first to Sanc. Dominic, and then extended in the wrong gender to Sancta Dominica, otherwise Saint Sunday? Who shall say? It may have been so.

It is perhaps in their pleasures, more than in their pursuits, that the character of a people is to be best seen. Allusion has been made to the obsolete Trinity Fair in Chapter XII.; but the Wake has remained to this day, less loyally observed perhaps, but rich in traditions of past glories.

Willenhall Wake falls on the first Sunday after September 11th, the Feast of St. Giles, to whom the old church is dedicated.

Among the wakes of the Black Country none are richer in reminiscence of the old time forms of festivity than that of Willenhall. Although in later times the outward and visible sign of its celebration has dwindled down to an assemblage of shows and roundabouts, shooting galleries, and ginger-bread stalls, it was once accompanied by bull-baitings and cock-fighting, and all the other coarse and brutal sports in which our forefathers so much delighted.

At Wednesfield at one village wake
The cockers all did meet
At Billy Lane’s, the cock-fighter’s,
To have a sporting treat.

For Charley Marson’s spangled cock
Was matched to fight a red
That came from Will’n’all o’er the fields,
And belonged to “Cheeky Ned.”

Two finer birds in any cock-pit
Two never yet was seen.
Though the Wednesfield men declared
Their cock was sure to win.

The cocks fought well, and feathers fled
All round about the pit,
While blood from both of ’em did flow
Yet ne’er un would submit.

At last the spangled Wedgefield bird
Began to show defeat,
When Billy Lane, he up and swore
The bird shouldn’t be beat;

For he would fight the biggest mon
That came from Will’n’all town,
When on the word, old “Cheeky Ned”
Got up and knocked him down.

To fight they went like bull-dogs,
As it is very well known,
Till “Cheeky Ned” seized Billy’s thumb,
And bit it to the bone.

At this the Wednesfield men begun
Their comrade’s part to take,
And never was a fiercer fight
Fought at a village wake.

They beat the men from Will’n’all town
Back to their town again,
And long they will remember
This Wednesfield wake and main.

The site of the Willenhall Bull Ring, it may be added for the information of future generations, was opposite the Baptist Chapel, Little London, where Temple Bar joins the Wednesfield and Bloxwich Roads.

Among other Wake observances of the last century were the “Club Walkings” or processioning of the Friendly Societies, whose members first attended a brief service in the church, and then spent the rest of the day in feasting at the Neptune Inn opposite. Tradition hath it that further back, well into the Georgian era, and certainly before Mr. Fisher’s time, another Wake custom was that of “kissing the parson,” a privilege of which the women were said to be very jealous.

In the year 1857 the Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, Member of Parliament for the Borough of Wolverhampton, of which this township was part, inaugurated in Willenhall one of the first exhibitions of fine art and industry ever held in the Black Country. It was opened on the Monday in the Wake week, and Mr. Villiers alluded to the fact that “they met in the midst of one of those old-fashioned wakes which it was the humour of their ancestors to establish and be pleased with,” and the right hon. gentleman proceeded to contrast the present with the past conditions of Willenhall Wake-time.

A flourishing Free Library—founded like many another in the face of great local opposition and prejudice—is one of the legacies of that exhibition, from the date of which may be traced the more rational observance of Wake-time.

With the advance of science and art and the spread of popular education, the future prosperity of an ingenious community, like that of the skilled mechanics and deft craftsmen of this township, is assured. Impressed with such certitude it is all but a work of supererogation to echo the patriotic sentiment of the old-time townsfolk—

“LET WILLENHALL FLOURISH!”

The End.